This paper reports on the critical role that marketing can have on the health, physical education, recreation, and dance professions (HPERD) and on a national survey of college administrators in the field and their attitudes and practices at the college level. The first half of the paper briefly traces the growing impact of marketing on service sector entities and clarifies misconceptions and misunderstandings about marketing that hinder its acceptance and implementation at institutions of higher education. This section covers marketing history and the HPERD professions, principles of marketing, and marketing methods. The research report describes a survey of 887 administrators (43 percent responded with usable surveys) and their personal perspective on the importance and current levels of practice of 15 marketing methods. From the results the paper concludes that the perceived importance of marketing methods is not reflected in equivalent practice as respondents rated 13 of the 15 marketing methods important and yet reported their practice of these as infrequent. In addition administrators at HPERD units in higher education are consistent in their ratings of the importance and practice of the selected marketing methods despite regional and institution-type differences. Appendixes contains the survey instrument, and a figure depicting the ratings of importance and level of current practice of 15 selected marketing methods. Contains 33 references. (JB)